This is the first installment of many, where I look back on my dusty shelves in remembrance of those great records of yesteryear, and what better way to begin than with the music of obsolete technology! This morning while eating my Trader Joe's quiche, I am pulling from the vault my favorite release of 2002 (that is now eight years ago... god...), symphony #2 for dot matrix printers by [The User]. I purchased the LP back when I had a habit of collecting cool album covers (and ended up getting many shit records as a result), and the simplistic and nostalgia-inducing cover of this particular record, decorated merely by a low-res photograph of the original 8 inch floppy disc, had me sold.
The symphony, as the jacket explains it, "...is a performance for fourteen dot matrix printers played by an orchestra of personal computers from the early nineties and conducted by a similarly obsolete file server." Basically, certain text files were created to exploit the noisy operation of dot matrix printers and synchronize the printers' printing of these files into what I consider a highly danceable trip down memory lane.
[The User] is a Canadian art collective, consisting of architect/installation artist Thomas McIntosh and sound artist Emmanuel Madan, and they are still going strong.
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